Bonaventura Duda liked to call himself a man of longing. He was a man of longing throughout his whole life, and — as his days went on — increasingly so. And in all this he laboured tirelessly to go out and meet that longing, striving for its fulfilment.

But he was equally a man of delight. Whenever some longing of his was fulfilled, whenever he was assured of a beauty, goodness or truth ripened in someone's life, he would rejoice greatly. His joy was truly infectious. Together with him, it carried along many of those around him. 

Stjepan Lice, from the book I Lived in the Time of Fra Bonaventura Duda

Bonaventura Duda in fact lived his whole life without a father or mother. That is why he loved the feast of Christmas so much, experiencing the Holy Family as his own: “Do you want to celebrate Christmas well? Find a way to be someone’s companion and fellow-sufferer, and, if possible, someone who brings them joy. Perhaps that will be through nothing more than a helpless silence. But if you can, find a way to make it — without troubling anyone — a deed.”

Antica Duda became pregnant by a man unknown to us, and gave birth to a son on 14 January 1924 in Rijeka, who at baptism was named Roko. There exists a photograph of a man in a naval officer's uniform, on the back of which, shortly before his own death, Duda wrote with a trembling hand: ‘most probably my father.’ At the depths of his being there lay the pain of not knowing the father by whom he had been ‘accidentally’ conceived, and whose photograph — a handsome man in an officer's uniform — he jealously and secretly kept, and often held in his hands: “I saw my father only once, from behind. My aunt in Rijeka showed him to me, near the Capuchins, as he passed by us.”

For just his first three months he lived with his mother's sister Marija on Krk, and he never saw his mother again after the age of seven, for she lay ill with consumption in hospital for two years before her death, and he had no money for the journey to visit her. She died without his ever seeing her. He testified later that he did not even remember her face, only the wonderful voice with which she used to sing to him: “My mother worked in hospitals in Rijeka, in Sušak, in Zagreb, in Petrinja… until she died in January 1934, and that among the very same Sisters with whom I too had taken refuge, in the sanatorium at Klenovnik. She left a beautiful impression on me, busy with her work teaching the girls of Kras church singing, and then taking a lively part in the Sunday liturgy. I chose the day of my mother's death for the great day of my first Mass, celebrated at Our Lady of Trsat, in the year of Our Lord 1950. On many occasions I went to the cemetery where she was buried, but never to her grave. Utterly poor in life, she had no grave of her own, so I prayed before the central cross. May she rejoice in God's eternity.”

The earliest years of his childhood are bound up with deep memories of Aunt Marija: “Aunt Marija, my mother's sister, was — by the gift of boundless Providence — my wondrous 'substitute mother'. She had the deepest feelings towards me; from the age of three months and throughout my whole childhood, she was everything to me.” He remembers making a pilgrimage on a donkey, as a five-year-old, with Aunt Marija and his uncle's wife to Gorica, to Our Lady of Gorica: “Although I lived poor with poor Aunt Marija, I felt happy, utterly happy. That simple, deeply devout Christian woman became my true mother in upbringing. She was an entirely joyful person. Even then I experienced in her the beauty of what the Christian faith brings into human consciences and human lives — that goodness, that harmony. Oh, that is divine… As I think now of my childhood — and so it continued to be later in my life — I have the feeling that I breathed in God's air, God's grace, even then, and that, in a happy balance between want and separation from my mother, I spontaneously developed my natural abilities through Aunt Marija and received my first proclamation of the faith. Aunt Marija's boundless love, her spirit of devotion and her good example poured over into my soul. My grandmother knew all the Sunday Gospels by heart. Even as such — a small boy of five or six — I knew how to 'chant' the whole Passion of Jesus according to Matthew by heart, which I would do quite freely and innocently even outside church. I listened with all my attention as the village singers sang the Passion of Jesus on Palm Sunday. I brought with me from my homeland a soul formed in the shadow of the church, but — since I was the youngest in the class, and Sušak is a port town — also every capacity of wax to be shaped into any figure. There, then, already in early childhood, God's hand gave me the gift of closeness. That gift I have never again let slip from my soul.”

A special place on his boyhood path was taken by his longing for school: “At five and a half I enrolled myself in the primary school in the village of Kras (1929–1933). Quite of my own accord, without anyone telling me to, I, at five and a half, set off towards the school building… the teacher, Nevenka, sensed that this was not some unreasonable whim of an immature child. On the contrary, she saw that she had before her a bright and unusual child. She soon found a way to enrol me. So from five and a half I began my journey through school. I know now that age and character do not necessarily go together in the same way for every person. I had an inner sense of an 'adult' relationship to knowledge. From an early age I was cuppidus scientiae (eager for knowledge). But despite that, I remained a boy who loved his peers. I gladly played with them, jumped about, sang.” From the first form and through the whole of his schooling his marks were excellent; he was an exceptionally gifted pupil.

When his aunt could no longer afford to keep him in school, she transferred him to another aunt, but in occupied Rijeka, Duda, who was living in the Italian sector, was discovered as a small Croatian migrant and expelled. He was placed in Sušak, living in attics with dock workers, eating at a shelter with the rest of the poor; he was a child who had to look after himself alone. At one point his life nonetheless changed. In church he asked a nun for permission to serve at the altar, but she refused him, until one occasion when, because of the cold, none of the altar servers turned up; Sister Danila gave way before Roko's persistence and allowed him to serve. That nun then became a mother to him, and he remained two years in Sušak: “Sister Danila, also sensing me deeply in her heart, brought into my soul the experience of religious readiness to accept God's call, more by the example of her joyful service before the Lord's altar than by any kind of persuasion.”

Even so, he had to part, at an early age, from both his substitute mothers: “A wondrous inner closeness flowed within me towards these two dear people. For both of them, the pain of parting was great in their hearts. My own openness towards God's fatherhood was even greater still. They saw this, and so these two 'substitute mothers' of mine, both touched by God, agreed after sincere conversations: 'Let him go, in God's name!' I felt a deep call from God. From there my spiritual strength came to me. My courage at the parting came to me from within. I felt free.”

At the age of eleven the guardian called him to move to the friary in Varaždin, telling him that he did not have to become a priest, but that he would be given schooling and a roof over his head. Roko happily agreed; he recalls how the women gathered clothes for him so that he would have something to bring, and he boarded the train and arrived in Varaždin. Because of his poverty and his having been left without parents, there always lived within him a humble soul, that true Franciscan spirit.

St Francis and Assisi hold a special place in his life: “My St Francis? He is my closest mediator to Jesus Christ, along with Mary, of course, the Mother of Jesus. In Assisi I somehow felt at home. It seems to me, now, that I shall meet Francis. And here is a boy. Under his arm he carries a watermelon, alive and real. I go up to him, we begin to talk. What do you call that, I mean the watermelon? What is it for? It will be their supper. How many of them are there? Eight. What else will they have for supper? That is all. At that time I myself was in want, a poor student. Nor was I generous — I was rather tight-fisted. Still, I find fifty or a hundred lire, enough for the tram. I hand it to him for bread. He ran off joyfully. I long enjoyed, afterwards, the look he gave me. He came back a year later and goes on to testify: I got off at the station of Santa Maria degli Angeli (…) But darkness fell sooner than I expected. In the hamlets there was still no electricity. I lost my way. Here and there I heard voices in the houses. I stopped before one and called out to ask whether anyone could show me the way (…) Suddenly a boy dashed out of the house and threw his arms around my neck: 'È lei, padre! Is it you, father!' Who would have expected it — it was that same boy I had met a year before. He introduced me to his parents and, joyfully, as if to an old friend, led me to San Damiano.”

Fra Bonaventura Duda: “I never fell in love. But I do remember girls I liked. Falling in love can be dangerous, even tragic — but it can also be a good thing…”

 

“I loved and worked for all people. My life is a wonder at everything of God that ceaselessly comes before our eyes. I might say that my whole life is: o quam bona ventura (‘oh, how good is what comes’). Above all I feel that I am indebted to many people. I would put it devoutly: onto the path of my life God sent many people who made my life more beautiful, who shaped me towards good, or at least towards something better… I could — as though from a mosaic — pick out many little tiles, little cells, which I recognise as belonging to them, the influence of this person and that, even this and that particular character. …And I was drawn to many things; and in the end it fell to me to devote myself to the Bible, and more closely to the New Testament, and more especially still to St Paul. Sister Danila will remain in my memory as the mother of my Franciscan and priestly vocation. Others belong there too, first of all my Aunt Marija, and then, from Trsat, Father Leonardo Novaković, who was guardian at the time, and for seventeen years before that master of novices. And if I wanted to say who deserves the most credit, I would truly name all three of them, but also many other people besides. Of course, before all of them and after all of them, the grace of God, which made use of them too… Through my soul there gladly runs a verse: 'There are places hidden in us — that shall live in time to come… They must be well concealed — the leaven of what is yet to be. After Tin, I too am a man of the future!' (Collected Works, XV, 224)

He recalls how, while translating the Bible, he became friends with Jure Kaštelan, professor of literature and poet, and how one day he travelled up the canyon of the River Cetina to his birthplace: “He was overjoyed that I, a Franciscan priest, had been able to come to his elderly mother, née Mandić, a distant relation of the then-Blessed Leopold Mandić. I noticed how all the great stages of the world — the University of Zagreb, standing in literary circles, a lectureship at the Sorbonne in Paris, and so on — are not able to move a man the way a meeting with his mother, a simple woman, can.”

“I never set out to study the Bible. In any case, that specialisation only comes at the end of many years of study. In my day people spoke of it as something unattainable. One had to know languages… I was sent to the Franciscan university in Rome to take a doctorate in theology. I defended a dissertation on Ivan Stojković of Dubrovnik (d. 1443) and his teaching on the Church at the Council of Basel. Certain happy circumstances led my older friends to persuade me to enrol, now, for further study at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. And, as one of my late professors used to say: 'It worked out!' Around 1965, voices were heard among us from every side — I always remember those wonderful 'voices' about the life of Ivana Arška! — calling for the need of a Bible. I myself felt the need for a new translation, but not in the least that I should be the one to take part in it. And there I suddenly found myself caught up in the work. Quite simply, it had to be taken on. At that time Tomislav Ladan said, in one important conversation: 'There are moments and occasions when the question is not whether we are able, but whether we must. And then one has to set to and do it properly.' And so it was, more or less, back then with our Bible team too. And now? There is still so much I would like to do. But I remember, from my first years of study, reading some Indian wisdom in that little Croatian encyclopaedia: 'Do not plough too wide a field, lest your strength should fail you!'”

“Fra Bonaventura Duda is surely the most recognisable Franciscan in Croatia, a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional diligence — a Franciscan with his whole heart, a man in love with St Francis and with the Franciscan way, an enthralling preacher of the Gospel. And perhaps still the best son of St Francis. No one feels small, overlooked or passed over beside him. That is understandable, because he is always the lesser brother, and gives all of us the right to be greater and more important than himself. Alongside Brother Bonaventura, and through him, we Franciscans of the Croatian Franciscan Province of Sts Cyril and Methodius have become a little better, and are more truly sons of St Francis than we would have been without him. I may even say that Croatian Franciscans of the last half-century bear, to a greater or lesser degree, a recognisable stamp of his Franciscan spirit. What my brothers and I experience daily is that Bonaventura is above all a true son of St Francis, and so for those of us who are younger he is a teacher of a real, lasting and faithful Franciscan way of life. His great age has not distanced him from people, because he does not wish to be their teacher, still less does he wish to impose his own views upon them. He is a man who marvels at God and at God's works in people, and so he is a dear man who has entered many hearts — a sign that whoever wishes to be close to God is also close to man. Our fra Bonaventura's life motto — which also appears on his first-Mass memorial card — is: 'Jesus, boundless goodness!' With these words fra Bonaventura confesses that Jesus Christ has traced out the path of his life, and he ascribes to Jesus Christ every step and every work of his life, especially those works which we, together with him, regard as undertakings for the good of our homeland's Church. These are the founding of Glas Koncila, the preparation of the Bible, and the spreading of the thought of the Second Vatican Council. These and many other works fra Bonaventura does not consider his own, nor does he think them the fruit of his own talent and labour; rather, he ascribes them to God, from whose hands he received life, all his gifts, and every challenge towards creative work. And so: 'Jesus, boundless goodness,' thank you for having given to our Franciscan brotherhood such a man, and such a brother, as fra Bonaventura.” (Fra Željko Železnjak, Provincial Minister)

“Why do I stress so much that I am, first of all, a friar. I often say: you know, that is the one thing I have paid for with my very self. I regard being a friar as the form my Christianity has taken. True, I also work as a professor as a Christian — or at least I would like to. But that came later. In any case, if you want to know, I stumbled upon my Franciscan vocation quite simply by God's own goodness. One day it appealed to me as my own personal way of existing. And that was very early, at the age of eleven. Even today I like to sit, at Trsat, under the chestnut tree — sadly there's some ugly garage there now — where two old friars (Leonard Novaković and Anaklet Zadravec) took counsel about me. It seemed to them that something might come of me… And the more I grew, the more I learned that this had to be fought for and, as I said, paid for with myself. In fact, I bought myself. I hope I shall go on like that, that others will put up with me, and support me too… 'Not I, but the grace of God within me,' as St Paul would say.”

“Our calling, then, is not merely to bring the Gospel to life in our own lives, but to bring the Gospel to life in the world too. That is the calling of the Franciscan way. Since the Gospel was written for the sake of life, there is truly no greater service to God and to humanity than service to the Gospel, than a life lived for the Gospel. But just as there are people who arrange half their life according to the teaching of the Gospel, and the other half according to the principles of the world (attempting to live a double life!), so too there are people who give only half their life to the Gospel. The rest they keep back for themselves, to give to the friends of this world. And they for ever feel that they have only half a life — but not the half they kept for themselves; rather, the half they gave to the Gospel. Whoever, then, wishes to have their whole life, let them give the whole of it for the Gospel! Let the leaven of the holy Gospel, then, leaven the whole lump, our whole life: so that our whole life may be lived according to the Gospel, and wholly spent for the Gospel! That is the ultimate thought of St Francis. That is the full meaning of the Franciscan way. A life according to the Gospel and for the Gospel!”

“I always loved souls of the Daniel kind, as the angel Gabriel called him, as with Daniel: '…for you are a man greatly beloved'… Vir desideriorum — a man of desires, I always liked that expression.” A happy life means many dreams fulfilled one after another: “Dream, then, my young friends. Dream, as all the great men of the Old Testament dreamed! Dream like the child Jesus in Mary's arms! And may the Lord grant you the fulfilment of all your beautiful dreams throughout your life. That is what I wished to have within myself, and to awaken in others. My aunt asked me that same question in 1947. We were waiting for the boat at Omišalj. My aunt had brought me up from childhood. I said, 'Yes, I am happy.' And she said: 'You never asked for much, nor did you ever demand anything. I never raised a hand against you, because I was not your real mother. In any case, I never needed to.' I was never unhappy. I had difficult hours, but I was never unhappy.” Fra Emanuel Hoško adds: “Duda was and remained a 'man of desires'. He fulfilled many desires, his own and other people's. Many came to know him, and countless are those who have encountered his works. Would that these different encounters might lead them all to the same conclusion: that a 'man of desires' is necessarily a man who is struck by the needs of the age and answers them by turning desires into deeds.”

“He never tried to be a man of compromise, and yet all of us always believed in his good will and his outstanding competence. It was impossible to belittle him or to disregard him; it was perfectly clear what he thought — and where he stood — and yet it was impossible to experience him as an opponent. Even in his silence, the goodness of the Gospel shone through him, without a trace of contrived obligingness — whether he was speaking or writing, whether he was singing or playing music. There was never in him any striving to please whoever he was speaking with, never any unease over his own opinion, or someone else's, being different. But these were not compromises that avoided conflict; rather, they were an outstretched hand of mutual understanding. And we regularly strove to grasp his position, and were quick to acknowledge that he was right — even when we could not accept it entirely. What mattered here was that his position — even when highly critical and significantly different — was never a personal stance that turned us into opponents or supporters, but rather an insight into the real state of things, which could be very painful, yet was never experienced as hostile. And in all this you never felt defeated, but enlightened. Close and sincere, without compromise, simple without ever being simplistic. And on many questions in our circles he has always been indispensable.” Don Živko Kustić

A special place in his life was held by his love for his homeland: in those difficult years of war, when — as he put it in verse — one great, monstrous lie was at work along our borders and in the very heart of our beautiful homeland, Duda gave voice to his immense love of country in inspired lines, preaching truth and love, and raising his voice against hatred, falsehood and destruction. In a bibliophile edition, set against the background of Željko Lapuh's Wall of Flame, fra Bonaventura speaks of his love for his wounded homeland, asking in verse when Noah's Ark might again come to rest somewhere on the mountains of Ararat, or in the lowlands — here, among us (Čeka duša moja, 1991). He was deeply moved by Želimir Ciglar's Vukovar Our Father, published in Đurđica Ivanišević's book Our Father from Croatia, which closes with an afterword by Duda in which he writes: And in that refrain which I, as a boy, a little Glagolitic altar server on Krk, used to sing at Mass — “Deliver us from enmity!” — from both enmity and from the enemy — the older I grow, the more I hear in it a call to friendship. That we should be friends, and become worthy of friends. The times are wicked and full of trial. In her Sunday Prayer of the Exile, Đurđica Ivanišević sorrowfully senses the wickedness of the age (…) We shall overcome the Enemy if this evil time draws us closer together, if, ever more, at least among ourselves, we become people who are friends, people who are tolerant and bearable towards one another. And no enemy at our borders will be able to do us any harm, if we are friends at least within our own borders.

Mention should also be made of the Soldier's Prayer Book, modest in size and appearance, but at the time an exceptionally important, practical pastoral response to the great stress and mortal danger in which the Croatian soldier then lived — along with the interesting fact that most of them carried a rosary, yet knew hardly a single prayer themselves. Asked by a journalist why, in preparing that prayer book, he had written — in verse — that he did not pray while cursing, for what kind of prayer would that be, but prayed instead for the salvation of both sides, he replied: “And then one of your colleagues from Radio Sljeme told me that a friend of his at the front had been sent a copy of that prayer book, on which he had written: 'God loves me.' When a soldier in the trench comes to the realisation that God loves him, then I would give everything for that flash of enlightenment!”

In general he liked to talk with those who bore a heavy cross in life: “The cross is, above all, very often oneself. It is as though God had only half-made us. To each of us he has given some already-cultivated ground within ourselves, and left the rest to our own diligence, to be won and worked. Furthermore, other people are a cross to us too. Let us not forget that we, too, very often without knowing it, are a cross to others. That is why the Stations of the Cross include a fourth station: Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross. To carry another's cross for them, or at least to strive never to be a cross to anyone ourselves, is a sign of great humanity.”

I call upon your holy eyes, crucified Jesus! Let them look upon me to the very depths of my being. Your gaze reaches deeper than the eye of my own conscience. As far as your gaze reaches, I beg you, forgive me; I beg you, heal me;

have mercy on me and keep me by your holy eye, that I may always walk “before your eyes — loving you, serving you, rejoicing in you and in you.                     Bonaventura Duda

“I did all sorts of things. I see myself like this: the best thing I ever tried to do was not my work as a professor, nor my writing, nor my sermons, but my work 'at the porter's lodge' (the rooms for conversation by the main entrance of the friary at Kaptol), sharing the Word about the Word in conversations with many people, from the poor and unlettered to academics and distinguished figures in various professions. I was a 'doctor of everything and nothing', but I did not work in a slapdash way. My role is to give people counsel. I am often in the waiting room or at the lodge, waiting for strangers who come for advice. All kinds of people come — the small, the ordinary, the great, the learned, the sick, the healthy… I listen to them, and if I can give good advice, I give it; if I myself do not know what to say, then I tell them, 'Patience is your salvation.' From 1950 I preached with enthusiasm in the countryside, and from 1982 at Kaptol. I preach Jesus's message to young people. I am not a bore — I don't preach for too long, a quarter of an hour at most. That is enough. That I know how to do. I speak logically, briefly and clearly. Only once did I speak for a long time — at Međugorje I preached for three-quarters of an hour before fifty thousand people.”

We close with a poem by Bonaventura Ćuk, who left his mark on the whole of Duda's Franciscan journey. His poem Shall I Too Go to Heaven?, which is not really a question at all, but a plea, tender and beseeching, Duda would later come upon and take as a kind of life motto. He bears witness to this poem — which speaks of the end of life, and of how he came to receive his religious name — in his book I Entrusted My Staff to God: “And I am deeply soothed by the poem — perhaps the only one — of the man who was once my teacher, a great philosopher and theologian, who died young — like Jesus, at thirty-three. He was a friar, Bonaventura Ćuk. I was given his name after him. How improbable and strange that sounds — and yet how wondrous. You are from everlasting to everlasting, while I began within time. But since I began, you wish to give me a share in your eternity. I said, you have given me half of your eternity. Yet eternity has neither beginning nor end, and so no half either — it is all one single moment, and every one of its moments is eternity. Still, humanly speaking, I say: half. Since I came to be, you wish me to live with you, in you. Grant that I may die in grace!” In Latin it reads: 'Gere curam mei finis! Take care of my earthly end!'

Let us listen to Bonaventura Duda himself

Shall I Too Go to Heaven?

Shall I too, Lord, one day see heaven?
I long to, yet I fear —
for there will be such glory and light,
and I stand so lowly here!

But if you have some little corner,
even that would be enough for me.
I'll squeeze myself in there, thin as a reed —
narrow enough is my shoulder, you'll see.

I'll cast no shadow over anyone,
I'll make no noise, no fuss.
Lord, only do not forget me,
if that would please you thus.

 

And if my presence does not please you,
a ragged soul like mine,
then let me wait, at least, by the door,
for some acquaintance of Thine —

To beg of them a prayer for me.
And if not even that's allowed,
I'll wait outside there all the same,
if only to keep with the crowd!

And when they enter, those to whom it's given,
and there's no room left inside —
Heaven is small, but never mind…
Your heart is open wide…